In a review of the press appearing in Zvezda,
No. 4, it was correctly stated that at the present moment all Marxist
circles are interested in the question of liquidationism and in assessing
the problem of the hegemony of the proletariat; and that if the polemics
over this important question are to bear fruit, they must deal with
principles, they must not be the “ad hominem and malicious
polemics carried on by Nasha Zarya”.

I fully share this opinion and shall, therefore, pass over in complete
silence the tricks resorted to by that magazine to imply that one can
understand only whom the controversy is about, but not
what it is about (Nasha Zarya, No. 11–12, p. 47). I
shall take Nasha Zarya itself for a year—just up to its
first anniversary and try to examine what it is about and what the
magazine has to say on this score.

The first issue of Nasha Zarya appeared in January 1910. In
the second issue, which appeared in February, Mr. Potresov already declared
that the controversy between the Machians and the Marxists, and the
question of liquidationism were included among the
“trivialities”. “I ask the reader,” wrote Mr. Potresov,
“whether it is possible that there can exist, in this year of 1909, as
something that is actually real and not a figment of a diseased
imagination, a liquidationist tendency, a tendency to liquidate what is
already beyond liquidation and actually no longer exists as an organised
whole” (p. 61).

By this unsuccessful attempt to evade the issue, Mr. Potresov supplied
the best corroboration, one startling in its Herostratean boldness, of the
view which he intended to refute. In January and February 1910,
Mr. Potresov must
have known that his opponents would not agree with his appraisal of the
actual state of affairs. Consequently, it could not be dismissed as
something “which no longer exists” since the non-existent cannot be
appraised. The question is not whether in actual practice one-tenth, or
one-twentieth, or one-hundredth, or any other fraction equals nought, it is
whether there exists a trend which regards that fraction as
superfluous. The question is whether there is a difference in principle as
to the significance of the fraction, what attitude should be taken toward
it, should it be increased, etc. By replying to this question that
there is “nothing”, “nought”, and that “nought is but nought”,
Mr. Potresov fully expressed the liquidationist trend whose existence he
denies. His sally was remarkable only for its particular “malice” (as it
was aptly put in the press review in Zvezda, No. 4), for its lack
of straightforwardness and journalistic clarity. But it is precisely
because it is not a matter of, personalities, but of a trend, that Moscow
rushed to the assistance of St. Petersburg. The Moscow
Vozrozhdeniye,[2] No. 5, of March 30, 1910, quoted Mr. Potresov
approvingly and added on its own behalf: “There is nothing to liquidate
and for ourselves we may add, the dream of resuscitating that hierarchy, in
its old”, etc., “shape is nothing but a harmful, reactionary utopia”
(p. 51).

It is quite obvious that it is not a question of the old
shape, but of the old substance. It is quite obvious also
that the question of “liquidating” is inseparably connected with the
question of “resuscitating”. Vozrozhdeniye went just one little
step farther than Mr. Potresov; it expressed the same idea a
little more clearly, more straightforwardly and more honestly. It dealt
with trends and not with personalities. Persons may be evasive rather than
straightforward, but trends are certain to reveal themselves in the most
varied circumstances, shapes and forms.

Take, for instance, Mr. Bazarov, who was a Bolshevik once and perhaps
still considers himself one—all kinds of strange things happen in our
days. In the April issue of Nasha Zarya he refuted Mr. Potresov,
and did this so success fully, so fortunately (for Potresov) that he
declared literally that “the notorious question of hegemony” is “the
biggest and yet most trivial misunderstanding” (p. 87). Note:
Mr. Bazarov refers to that question as “notorious”, i.e., one that had
been raised before, that was already known in April 1910! We note this
fact, it is very important. We note that Mr. Bazarov’s statement that
“there will be no question of hegemony” (p. 88) if among the petty
bourgeoisie in town and countryside there is “a sufficiently radical
sentiment against political privileges”, etc., and if it is “permeated
with a strongly nationalistic spirit”, actually amounts to a complete
failure to understand the idea of hegemony and to a renunciation of this
idea. It is precisely the concern of the leader to fight “nationalism”
and to drive it out of those “sentiments” of which Bazarov speaks. The
success of this work cannot be measured by immediate, direct results
achieved today. There are times when the results of the resistance to
nationalism, of resistance to the spirit of decay, and of resistance to
liquidationism—which, incidentally, is as much a manifestation of
bourgeois influence on the proletariat as is the nationalism which at times
affects a section of the workers—there are times when these results begin
to tell only after years, perhaps even after very many years. It happens
that a spark merely smoulders for many years, a spark which the petty
bourgeoisie regard and proclaim as non-existent, liquidated, extinguished,
etc., but which actually lives and feeds the spirit of resistance to
despondency and renunciation, and manifests itself after a protracted
period of time. Everywhere and always, opportunism clutches at the minute,
at the moment, at today, for it is unable to appreciate the connection
between “yesterday” and “tomorrow”. Marxism, on the other hand,
demands a clear awareness of this connection, an awareness that
expresses itself not in words alone but in deeds. That is why Marxism
cannot be reconciled with the liquidationist trend in general, and
particularly with the denial of hegemony.

St. Petersburg is followed by Moscow. The Menshevik, Mr. Potresov, is
followed by the former Bolshevik, Mr. Bazarov. Bazarov is followed by
Mr. V. Levitsky, who is a more straightforward and honest opponent than
Mr. Potresov. In the July issue of Nasha Zarya, Mr. V. Levitsky
writes:
“Whereas the previous [form of organisation of the class-conscious
workers] was the leadership in the national
struggle for political freedom, the coming one will be the class
[Mr. Levitsky’s emphasis] party of the masses who have embarked upon their
historic movement” (p. 103).

This one sentence represents a remarkably apt and concentrated
expression of the spirit of all the writings of the Levitskys,
Potresovs, Bazarovs, of the whole of Vozrozhdeniye, the whole of
Nasha Zarya, and the whole of Dyelo
Zhizni.[3] The above-quoted passage from Mr. Levitsky could be
supplemented, replaced, enlarged upon and illustrated by hundreds of other
quotations. It is just as “classical” a phrase as Bernstein’s famous:
“The movement is everything, the final aim is nothing”[4]—or like
Prokopovich’s (in the Credo of
1899)[5]: the workers should confine them selves to the economic
struggle, leaving the political struggle to the liberals.

Mr. Levitsky is theoretically incorrect when he contrasts
hegemony with a class party. This contrast alone furnishes sufficient
grounds for saying that the party which Nasha Zarya is in
actual fact following is not based on Marxism but on liberalism. Only
the theoreticians of liberalism through out the world (recall Sombart and
Brentano) conceive of a class labour party in the way Mr. Levitsky
“conceives” of it. From the standpoint of Marxism the class, so long as
it renounces the idea of hegemony or fails to appreciate it, is not a
class, or not yet a class, but a guild, or the sum total of
various guilds.

But while Mr. Levitsky is unfaithful to Marxism, he is quite faithful
to Nasha Zarya, i.e., to the liquidationist trend. What he said
about the substance of this trend is the honest truth. In the past
(as far as the followers of this trend are concerned) there was
“hegemony”; in the future there will not be, nor should there be,
any. And what about the present? At present there is the
amorphous agglomeration which represents the circle of writers and
reader friends of Nasha Zarya, Vozrozhdeniye and Dye to
Zhizni, who are engaged, at present, in this year of 1911, in
advocating the necessity, the inevitability, the usefulness and the logic
of a transition from the past concept of the hegemony of
the proletariat to the idea of a class party in the
Brentano[6] sense (or, for that matter, in the Struve or Izgoyev sense)
in the future. The fact that amorphism is one of the principles of
liquidationism was stated by its opponents in so many words as far back as
1908, i.e., a year before Nasha Zarya came into
existence, Since
Mr. Mayevsky[7] asks, in December 1910, what is liquidationism, we can
refer him to the answer given officially exactly two years ago. In that
answer he will find an exact and complete characterisation of Nasha
Zarya, although the latter came into existence a year after that. How
was this possible? It was possible because it was not, nor is it, a
question of personalities, but of a trend, which became apparent in 1907
(see, if you must, the concluding part of the pamphlet by Mr. Cherevanin
himself, where he deals with the events of the spring of
19O7[8]), found patent expression in 1908, was appraised by its
opponents at the end of 1908, and in 1910 founded for itself an open press
organ and organs.

When you say: in the past there was hegemony, but in the
future there ought to be a “class party”—you thereby glaringly show the
connection between liquidationism and the renunciation of hegemony, and
confirm the fact that this trend has broken with Marxism. Marxism
maintains:
since there was “hegemony” in the past, consequently, the sum of trades,
specialities, guilds gave rise to the class; for it is the consciousness of
the idea of hegemony and its implementation through their own activities
that converts the guilds as a whole into a class. And once they have grown
to the level of a “class”, no external conditions, no burdens, no
reduction of the whole to a fraction, no rejoicing on the part of
Vekhi, and no pusillanimity on the part of the opportunists, can
stifle this young shoot. Even if it is not “seen” on the surface (the
Potresovs do not see it, or pretend not to see it, because they do
not care to see it), it is alive; it lives, preserving the “past” in the,
present, and carrying it into the future. Because there was hegemony in the
past, Marxists are in duty bound—despite all and sundry
renunciators—to uphold its idea in the present and in the future; and
this ideological task fully corresponds to the material conditions which
have created the class out of guilds and which continue to create, extend
and consolidate, it, and which lend strength to its resistance to all
“manifestations of bourgeois influence

The magazine Nasha Zarya, however, in the issues published
during the year, represents, in a concentrated form, that very expression
of bourgeois influence on the proletariat. Liquidationism exists not only
as a trend of people who profess to be the supporters of a given class. It
represents one of the minor streams in that wide torrent of “regression”
which has swept up several classes, is characteristic of the three years
1908-10 and, perhaps, will remain characteristic of a few more years. In
the present article I had to confine myself to a definition of this minor
stream on the basis of quotations from Nasha Zarya, Nos. 2–7. In
future articles I expect to dwell on Nos. 10, 11, and 12 of that magazine,
as well as to prove in greater detail that the minor stream of
liquidationism is but a part of the torrent of Vekhi doctrines.

Notes

[1]This article was published in No. 3 of Sovremennaya Zhizn
(Contemporary Life), a Bolshevik legal weekly socio-political
magazine published in Baku from March 26 (April 8) to April 22 (May 5),
1911, under the editorship of S. G. Shahumyan. Three issue appeared,
but after the confiscation of the third issue, the magazine was closed down
by the government.

[2]Vozrozhdeniye (Regeneration)—a legal
Menshevik-liquidator magazine, published in Moscow from December 1908 to
July 1910; it was replaced by the magazines Zhizn (Life)
in 1910 and Dyelo Zhizni (Life’s Cause) in 1911.

[3]Dyelo Zhizni (Life’s Cause)—a legal magazine of the
Menshevik liquidators, published in St. Petersburg from January to
October 1911.

[4]This refers to the thesis of Eduard Bernstein, an outspoken exponent of
revisionist ideas, founder of Bernsteinism, the anti-Marxist, opportunist
trend in international Social-Democracy, which arose at the end of the
nineteenth century in Germany.

[5]The reference is to the thesis of the Economists developed in their
programme Credo, written in 1899 by Y. D. Kuskova.

Economism was an opportunist trend in Russian Social-Democracy
at the turn of the century, a Russian variety of international
opportunism. The newspaper Rabochaya Mysl (Workers’
Thought) (1897–1902) and the magazine Rabocheye Dyelo
(The Workers’ Cause) (1899–1902) were organs of the Economists.

The Economists limited the tasks of the working-class movement to the
economic struggle for higher wages, better working conditions, etc.,
asserting that the political struggle was the affair of the liberal
bourgeoisie. They denied the leading role of the party of the working
class, considering that it should merely observe the spontaneous
development of the movement and record events. Deferring to the
“spontaneity” of the working-class movement, they belittled the
importance of revolutionary theory and class-consciousness, and claimed
that socialist ideology could develop from the spontaneous working-class
movement; they denied the necessity for bringing socialist consciousness
into the working-class movement from without, by the Marxist party, and
thus, they actually cleared the way for bourgeois ideology. They championed
the existing scattered, isolated study circles with their parochial
amateurish approach, encouraged disunity in the Social-Democratic ranks,
and opposed the creation of a centralised working-class party. Economism
threatened to turn the working class away from the path of class,
revolutionary struggle, and to convert it into a political appendage of the
bourgeoisie.

Comprehensive criticisms by Lenin of the Economist standpoint are to be
found in a number of his articles. They include “A Protest by Russian
Social-Democrats” (directed against the Credo; written in 1899,
while Lenin was in Siberian exile, and signed by 17 other exiled Marxists),
“A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social-Democracy”, “Apropos of the
Profession de foi” and “A Talk with Defenders of Economism”
Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?
brought about the ideological rout of Economism
A major part in the struggle against the Economists was also played by the
newspaper Iskra.

[6]Lujo Brentano (1844-1931)—the German bourgeois economist,
the author of a variety of bourgeois distortion of Marxism known as
Brentanoism. Brentano advocated “social peace” in capitalist society, the
possibility of overcoming the social contradictions of capitalism without
resorting to the class struggle, maintaining that the solution of the
working-class problem lay in the organisation of reformist trade unions and
the introduction of or legislation and that the interests of workers and
capitalists could be reconciled.

A theory analogous to that of Brentanoism was propounded in Russia by
the chief representative of “legal Marxism”, P. B. Struve, in an attempt
to use Marxism in the interests of the bourgeoisie. Lenin pointed out that
“Struveism” takes “from Marxism all that is acceptable to the liberal
bourgeoisie” and rejects its “living soul”, its revolutionary
nature. Struve was in complete agreement with the vulgar political economy
preached abroad, and ascribed to capitalism aims which were foreign to it,
namely the fullest satisfaction of man’s needs; he invited people to
“learn from capitalism”, and openly advocated Malthusian ideas. According
to Lenin, Struve was the “great master of renegacy, who, darting with
opportunism, with ‘criticism of Marx’, ended in the ranks of
counter-revolutionary bourgeois national-liberalism”.

Among Struve’s followers was the bourgeois publicist A. S. Izgoyev whom
Lenin called, as he did Struve, a “hack writer for the landlords and
capitalists”.

[8]Lenin is referring to Cherevanin’s pamphlet The London Congress of
the R.S.D.L.P. in 1907, at the end of which the author criticised the
decision of the Congress on the question of the labour congress and
non-Party workers’ organisations from the liquidationist standpoint.